1. Field
Organizers for holding surgical instruments in operating rooms.
2. General Background and State of the Art
Surgeons and their staff need their instrument and other items used during surgery to be readily accessible and well organized. Spending time looking for a clamp that other instruments hide adds crucial time to a surgery. That is undesirable for the patient because delays increase the length of the surgery and time under anesthesia.
Increasing the time for each surgery also is detrimental to surgeons, accompanying physicians and staff and to the hospital or surgical center. Surgeons and other physicians and staff are in high demand and often perform many procedures daily. Adding time to each surgery can eliminate one or more surgeries per day or force a surgery planned for one day to be delayed to the next or a later day.
For hospitals and surgical center, delays for each surgical team are compounded. The operating rooms at many hospitals are fully utilized. That fact alone causes delays in scheduling patients' surgeries. In addition, if some or all the operating rooms handle even one fewer procedures every day, the hospital becomes less efficient. Therefore, costs increase. Because fully equipped operating rooms are very expensive, adding more operating rooms is costly. On the other hand, having any added but under-utilized operating rooms generates less revenue to pay for the operating rooms or for other hospital expenses.
Increased costs and decreased efficiency are not the only concerns. At the end of each procedure, all instruments must be accounted for. For example, if the surgeon starts with 15 surgical clamps and has five unused surgical clamps left at the end of the surgery, the other ten must be accounted for. Otherwise, a missing clamp might be inside the patient. More likely, it may be hidden on the operating table or dropped on the floor. Finding the clamps may not be difficult and may not take excessive time, but the time spent adds up for each operating room, each hospital and hospitals in general.